Survivor of the Purge

THE ACCUSED (518 pp.)--Alexander Weissberg--Simon & Schuster ($4).

Alexander Weissberg, an Austrian physicist, was in charge of the construction of an experimental plant in Kharkov. Every morning when he swept off to work in his chauffeur-driven car he would pass the prison of Kholodnaya Gora and "avert my gaze" from the distressing spectacle of "prisoners clinging to the bars." But one morning in 1937, Weissberg was unable to avert his gaze: he was clinging to the bars himself.

Weissberg's arrest was part of the "Great Purge" that followed the first Moscow trials. The G.P.U. gave him a wide choice of crimes to "confess," but their highest hope was that he would admit to organizing a plot to murder Stalin. They were deeply offended when Weissberg not only resisted admitting this, but insisted that he was also innocent of such lesser delinquencies as planning to blow up the Kharkov tractor works, or of building a "counterrevolutionary, Trotskyist, fascist, terrorist, diversionist and espionage organization ... on the territory of the Soviet Union."

"The Conveyer." Weissberg soon learned that a claim to innocence was considered insufferable "provocation" by the G.P.U.--a deliberate attempt to undermine the confidence of the police authorities. Moreover, his rank entitled him to fabricate a really stunning spy story, superior in every way, for instance, to that of the simple worker in a cooperative fishery, who could only "confess" to having told the Germans how many fish were caught each month. And finally, the G.P.U. expected his "confession" to be watertight, as befitted the work of a well-trained Communist. "You've got to make [it] as though it were true," explained a fellow prisoner who acted as a G.P.U. spy in the intervals when he was not making confessions himself, "and the examiner's got to be able to pretend to believe in it, otherwise the whole thing's no good."

When Weissberg was obstinate, the G.P.U. shoveled him into "The Conveyer" --their nonstop interrogation belt which took innocent men in at one end and turned them out at the other as finished traitors, ready to be driven away to Siberia. They sat him on a plain stool while relays of examiners interrogated him day & night until his head was splitting and his splayed buttocks a mass of burning pulp. After a week of this, Weissberg "confessed"--a ticklish job, because his "crimes" had to dovetail exactly both into the "confessions" of his "accomplices" (i.e., his arrested friends who had incriminated him) and the overall plot requirements laid down by G.P.U. planners.

The examiners rewarded Weissberg with 24 hours of food and sleep. Refreshed, he boldly recanted the whole document. "You whore! You counter-revolutionary bandit!" raged the examiner, shoving him back on the stool. Weissberg stood it another four days, "confessed" again, again recanted. He then stood the "conveyer" for a further five days--and staggered out triumphant. From then on, the G.P.U. merely kept him in prison and beat him up occasionally.

Nine Million? Weissberg was not the only prisoner who defied the G.P.U. One skinny little Jewish tailor, who openly declared himself an anarchist but refused to admit to counter-revolutionary charges, "survived an almost uninterrupted 'conveyer' lasting for 31 days and . . . nights." Another prisoner, a Kharkov doctor, won through by dint of sheer comic genius and a wonderful memory for names. He not only confessed instantly, but wrote down the names of all his "accomplices"--i.e., "all the several hundred doctors in Kharkov." When the examiner refused to accept such a sweeping statement, the doctor addressed a strong letter to the authorities complaining that his examiner was halfhearted and inefficient.

Such men became loved and legendary figures in the prison world. But the general atmosphere was one of bewildered mass lunacy. One innocent man, broken on the "conveyer," would implicate a dozen innocent acquaintances. Each of these would implicate a dozen more. Prosecutors signed arrest warrants in bundles, without bothering to read the names. Examiners broke under the strain not only of their work but of fear of being named by their prisoners. Weissberg estimates (on good statistical grounds) that with this sort of thing happening all over the U.S.S.R., the total of purge prisoners could not have been less than 9,000,000. Most of them went to forced labor in Siberia--not because the labor camps needed them, but simply because there was nowhere else to put them.

Why? Why? Why? Weissberg, an Austrian citizen, was handed over to the Gestapo in the Russo-Nazi exchange of political prisoners after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. His later experience in Gestapo prisons (he now lives in Paris) forms no part of this book, which is one of the most searching, intelligent studies of its kind to date, replete with scores of prison case histories and exemplary samples of cool-headed observation. The key question in it (which has haunted Weissberg for years) is the great why? Why, he asks again & again, did Stalin decide to destroy not only a horde of innocent, industrious peasants, but also the bulk of those on whom the Soviet state most depended--scientists, skilled technicians, department managers, loyal officers, doctors, experts of every kind?

Weissberg can only think that "Stalin wanted power--power without limit." Only by mass terrorization could he carry out his aim of turning the U.S.S.R. into a nation consisting of "160 million slaves and one free man." Possibly this is the correct answer; but it will hardly satisfy those who, unlike Author Weissberg, believe that this was precisely the state of the Union before the purge began.

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